John's comments about standards may be true of some that have been developed
in the past, but I believe that a foundation ontology that will serve as a
standard of meaning for multiple independent developers does indeed have to
be developed by a large group representing many points of view. It is
important to recognize that a foundation ontology that has enough of the
fundamental, primitive elements to allow description of complex concepts in
many different fields will be a lot more complex than the typical standard
developed by a volunteer committee. In order to be able to represent almost
all of the concepts people want to talk about, it has to be at least as
complex as a human language - not just the grammar, but the basic vocabulary
as well. This has several implications:
(1) it will be time-consuming to learn how to use such a standard:
(2) therefore no one will bother learning it unless they have a strong
motivation
(2a) one motivation would be if there are powerful killer apps that
demonstrate the utility of the standard - but the standard would have to be
developed first, and then the applications would have to be developed. A
"killer app" for ontology would be a sophisticated natural language
understanding program, but that may well take many more times the effort to
develop than it would take to develop the ontology. That may also be true
of any other ontology-driven "killer app", and therefore John's suggestion
that convincing applications must necessarily precede development of the
standard do not apply in this case. This presents a problem: if a
convincing ontology application takes a lot of time to develop, would it be
possible to do so by any group of the size one finds in academic
institutions? My suspicion is that it would not. There is a solution to
this dilemma - collaborative development of a killer app by a large number
of independent contributors. But that presupposes the pre-existence of an
agreed standard of meaning. Thus a chicken-and-egg problem.
(2b) an alternative sufficient motivation would be if there was already
a large and diverse group of users of the standard, giving confidence that
using the standard would provide interoperability with a lot of other
programs. This also seems to be chicken-and-egg, but there is a simple way
to cut this Gordian knot. Provide adequate funding for development of the
standard by a group large enough to form a critical mass user community from
the start. This probably would be at least 50 and maybe over 100 different
developer and user groups.
The potential chaos of a large group will need to be controlled by an
efficient voting mechanism to resolve questions where choices need to me
made. Those that cannot abide such a process need not participate. (too bad
for them)
(3) Therefore, a plausible and (I believe) optimal and fastest route to
developing a foundation ontology that will be widely accepted, and serve as
a functioning standard of meaning, is to fund developing of such a standard
by a large group.
(4) The problem of different alternative formalisms for representing the
same concept can be solved by allowing all alternative representations,
along with translations mechanisms ("bridging axioms") to convert one view
to another, making all logically compatible views equally part of the
standard. Computational efficiency will not be compromised because in this
method, only one view will typically be extracted and used by any given
application - only the parts that are necessary for any given application
need be used. But the ability to **translate** information into alternative
representations, and be used accurately by programs that use alternative
representations, will be preserved.
(5) no existing ontology was developed by such a group, and the most complex
one (Cyc) is still largely proprietary. Prior experience with foundation
ontologies is not close enough to this approach to have any predictive power
about its potential for success. (01)
The catch, of course, is that funding a large group (say, 100 participants
at an average of 50% time each) costs than a typical small research project:
perhaps over $10 million per year for 2-3 years. But in comparison with the
estimated economic losses from lack of semantic interoperability (over $100
billion per year), and the even greater additional benefits of newer
programs that can take advantage of such a standard, this cost is miniscule.
Every program costing 10 million per year that has a plausible chance of
solving the semantic interoperability problem should be funded. (02)
With the new administration promising an increased attention to scientific
issues and to building economic infrastructure, there may in fact be a
chance to get such funding. The chance would be immensely improved if
people who have gut skepticism about such an approach would at least concede
that such an approach should be tried at least once before looking for
alternative, slower and less direct methods. I think there will be a narrow
window opening up in the near future for a serious effort of this kind. It
may be worthwhile to give some thought soon to how such an effort would be
organized, and who would be willing to participate. (03)
Pat (04)
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx (05)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
> Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 9:16 AM
> To: [ontolog-forum]
> Cc: janez.potocnik@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Next steps in using ontologies as
> standards
>
> Azamat,
>
> I have some concerns about such pronouncements, which sound good
> on the surface:
>
> > I hold with Ravi that it is a great undertaking. Though to
> > become such, the initiative needs deliberate planning...
> >
> > the Forum has time to debate and decide on a principal matter:
> > which general world model is most fitting to science, arts,
> > technology, commerce and industry, to conclude if "Standard
> > Ontology: a single malt or blended".
>
> The standards that have proved to be the most valuable in practice
> have been based on successful technologies that many independent
> groups have adopted, used, developed, and extended on major
> applications. In most cases, those standards started with a
> successful implementation (e.g., SQL or HTML), polished up the
> rough edges, made it more systematic, and added new features.
>
> About 20 years ago, some people working on standards got the idea
> that it would be good for the standards organizations to take a
> "proactive" stance in developing and promoting cleaner, more
> elegant systems that take advantage of the latest theories and
> practices. But the results have been decidedly "mixed".
>
> I once thought that "proactive standards" seemed promising,
> but after observing many attempts, I have very serious doubts.
> Among the problems with proactive standards is that they are
> inevitably designed by committees. The basic strength *and*
> weakness of a committee is the diversity of people with
> different backgrounds, views, and requirements. That gives
> them great strength in *evaluating* proposals from many
> different points of view. But it also means that committees
> inevitably have "too many cooks" who "spoil the broth" when
> they try to do the design.
>
> I don't believe that any proposed system should be adopted as
> a standard until *after* there has been a considerable amount
> of experience in using and testing it on a wide range of
> practical applications. Instead of "deliberate planning",
> we need extensive testing, comparison, and evaluation of
> proposed alternatives on major applications.
>
> John
>
>
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